This is a guest post by Hester Serebrin who will be occasionally writing for Choice Words.
“It is not enough to create jobs if we can’t get people to them. As is, commuting has become a heroic act.” – Brookings Institution Vice President and Director of Metropolitan Policy Bruce Katz
In early May, the Brookings Institution released both a new report and interactive tool designed to highlight the D.C.-based think tank’s first-of-its-kind analysis of how transit systems link workers to jobs.
The report, “Missed Opportunity: Transit and Jobs in Metropolitan America,” analyzes data from 371 transit providers in the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas, focusing on three primary metrics: coverage (share of working-age residents near a transit stop), service frequency (median wait for any rush hour transit vehicle), and job access (share of all jobs reachable via transit in 90 minutes). for a quick summary, go straight to the 100 metropolitan profiles, which cover the major highlights.
As one might expect, Seattle (and surrounding areas) did slightly better than the national average in all three measures. However, poor suburb-to-suburb transit coverage and an uneven distribution of jobs in low-skill industries added up to very low “job access” scores, both regionally and nationally.
Coverage
Brookings defined coverage for a given metro area by looking at the number of block groups (a geographical unit used by the Census Bureau that generally contains around 1000-1500 people) with access to at least one transit stop within 3/4 mile of their approximate centers. The study found that “nearly 70 percent of large metropolitan residents live in neighborhoods with access to transit service of some kind.” In the Seattle metro area (which includes Tacoma, Bellevue and in-between), that number jumps to 85 percent.
Service Frequency
The national median wait time for rush hour transit service in a block group was 10 minutes, while lucky Seattle metro area citizens have a mere 8.8 minute median wait.
Job Access
Statistics for metro-wide job access were a bit grim. The report found that the “typical metropolitan resident” can reach only about 30 percent of jobs in their metropolitan area via transit within 90 minutes. Seattle metro area residents didn’t fare much better, at 33 percent.
As one might expect, that figure (which is a very mathematically complicated average of every citizen’s “job access” across the entire metropolitan area) varies significantly within the “Seattle” metropolitan area: City residents enjoy slightly better job access (47% of jobs are within 90 minutes via transit), whereas suburban citizens can only reach 26% of jobs within 90 minutes via transit. (This trend is seen in every region of the country.)
And while the numbers also show better access to metropolitan jobs for residents of low-income communities (who are more likely to depend on transit) than for residents of higher-income communities – this is true both nationwide and in the Seattle metro area – the jobs accessible might not be appropriate for the workers who can reach them. Across all the profiled metro areas, more than half of the jobs in cities are in high-skill industries. According to the report, “[a]mong the 100 metro areas, 94 provide access to greater shares of their high-skill industry jobs via transit than their low- and middle-skill industry jobs.”
“Taken together,” the report concludes, “the findings for low-income and suburban neighborhoods raise concerns about the ability of a suburbanizing poor population to connect to employment opportunities via transit […] Although both low-income people and jobs have suburbanized over time, poor suburban residents are already less likely to live in a jobs-rich area than their higher-income counterparts, and as a result may have to commute farther to find work. This only serves to underscore the challenges facing these residents as they try to connect with employment opportunities throughout the wider metropolitan region.”
There’s no silver bullet for problems like these, and Brookings doesn’t pretend to have one. Instead, the report fleshes out a few broad suggestions (make job access part of total transportation decision making; link accessibility to next-generation metro growth policy and practice; deploy data and advanced technologies for decision making), and drives home the need for broadly coordinated, forward-thinking policy decisions. If the report’s analysis provides “a platform for decision makers to strengthen metropolitan economies and help all residents share in their growth,” then so much the better.
